At first blush, the second episode of season six is all about sex as currency. Pete making tacit arrangements to exchange Broadway tickets for Hair for a rendezvous in his Manhattan apartment; Joan dealing with the unctuous Herb and her unfortunate stint in the oldest profession last season; and finally with Don handing his married down-the-hall mistress money after a rendezvous we see all that can be exchanged for sex and the cost of the transaction.
We see a good examination into Don’s icky sexuality. A flashback shows a young Dick Whitman accompanying his pregnant mother for lodging at her aunt and uncle’s, which also happens to function as a shabby crimson-draped cathouse. For a young man to grow up surrounded by sex as commerce, it’s no wonder that Don views the act (particularly with his assignations outside of marriage) as stand-alone events, easily compartmentalized and separated from every other aspect of his life, like the rooms used by the working girls in the rural brothel where he grows up. Also, it’s not surprising that he wound up in advertising.
The final flashback goes even further to muddy Don’s bubbling id: he peers through a keyhole to see his Uncle Mac, presumed pimp and self-proclaimed “rooster” of the house, mounting Dick’s pregnant mother. This particular male gaze is disrupted by a hooker who labels him “a dirty little spy” and reminds him that he’s got his “own room…that’s how things work around here”. You can almost hear the walls fly up around the boy’s increasingly segmented psyche.
Not that men need an understandable psychological bedrock upon which to tomcat around. Pete gets himself into trouble when tickets for that dirty hippie musical are exchanged for a tryst in the Manhattan apartment. The young wife from his neighbourhood is clearly not “sophisticated” enough to handle a no-strings bed sheet romp and winds up, bloodied at her husband’s hand, at Pete and Trudy’s door. Pete’s indiscretion continue to push him onto a similar route already taken by Don when he’s banished from his suburban home by his wife, although in this case not so much for the act itself but the wantonness with which it is carried out. Pete will recover in his office and New York bachelor’s pad, but likely he won’t write soul-searching entries into a journal as Don did. Likely he’ll drink, lovingly cradle his rifle, and wind up crawling back to the fiercely determined wife he left behind.
Speaking of predictions gone awry, much of the consternation spouted about the Joan-prostitution episode from last season (me included) may have deeper roots than first thought. I still feel that the trajectory from aghast to consideration to fruition happened far too quickly, we may well see the echoes of that event reverberate through a bulk of the season. My sense is, especially from the tart exchange between Joan and Herb, that we will likely see a stronger Joan emerge the victor in any battle of wills.
The sub-text of the episode is even more intriguing. Entitled “The Collaborators”, it touches on all matter of collusion and how entering into such an arrangement often doesn’t make your opponent relent but actually makes them stronger. During a post-meeting quarrel about Herb’s plan to shift the Jaguar national ad campaign to a more locally skewed–and therefore less prestigious–angle (which Don “argues” for in a cracking scene that shows how good he is at manipulating a kind word and a firm handshake), Don echoes an event that presaged the Second World War.
“It’s like Munich,” he says likening Herb to the Nazis, who Neville Chamberlain hoped to appease Hitler by allowing him to overtake German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia. For those who may not recall what followed that 1938 pact, let me assure you that it didn’t turn out well. (Note: interesting that people who invoke the Nazis to enforce their disdain of exercise enthusiasts and strict grammarians, as rightfully they should; when someone, or a character, who witnessed the events says it, somehow that feels all right.)
Don is worried that Herb might consider his victory in bedding Joan in exchange for business means he can walk into the Sterling Cooper Draper Price office’s like a king returned. In light of that analysis, a potential battle between SCDP and Herb may be successful but ultimately pyrrhic. For those who were not around to see the disastrous victory of King Pyrrhus of Epirus against the Romans at Heraclea…never mind.
This episode marks the second time with Jon Hamm directing and he does a fine job, from the deftly handled flashback scenes (and that horrible voyeuristic moment with the young Dick Whitman, a scene so necessary but grotesque that it survives the hoariest of old tropes, that is “peered through a keyhole”), to the boardroom contretemps and the more delicate two-handers between himself and his married mistress.
Interesting that an episode which views collaboration suspiciously is also the first of the season in which Weiner shares writing credit. It’s hard not to feel that Weiner guards his passion project closely and when he has to give it over to another writer he watches silently from the hall, peering through the keyhole.
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